All posts by VirginieSelavy

Cinema releases

LE DONK AND SCOR-ZAY-ZEE

Le Donk

Format: Cinema

Release date: 9 October 2009

Venues: Curzon Soho, Gate, Ritzy, Screen Islington (London) and key cities

Distributor: Warp/Verve Pictures

Director: Shane Meadows

Cast: Paddy Considine, Dean Palinczuk, Shane Meadows, Olivia Colman

UK 2009

71 mins

As has been much publicised, Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee - the eighth film by Shane Meadows in 13 years - was made over five days (four consecutive days and one a few months later) and on a budget that seems preposterously low, even for a Meadows film. Shot on two DV cameras, behind one of which we frequently find Shane Meadows (playing himself), on real sets including a Travelodge hotel, backstage at an Arctic Monkeys show and what looks like the same row of Victorian terraced houses used in Meadows’s debut Smalltime (1996), the film makes no attempt to disguise its quickie-cheapness - in fact, it is almost worn as a badge of honour. The cast even wear the same clothes for the first three days - although this is perhaps to make continuity easier, or just to illustrate the poor personal hygiene of roadies.

The film has a simple premise: a Spinal Tap-like pseudo-documentary, it follows Le Donk, roadie to the stars (Paddy Considine), and his lodger-cum-protégé, rotund white Nottingham rapper Scor-Zay-Zee (Dean Palinczuk), as they blag their way onto an Arctic Monkeys bill at Manchester’s Old Trafford cricket ground. The dialogue is improvised around semi-scripted ideas as in HBO’s Curb your Enthusiasm and at times it’s almost as funny in that same cringing way.

Paddy Considine creates in Le Donk a character that is at times charming, cocky, confident and fun-loving, but often boorish, selfish or just plain ‘mardy’ - that particularly childish kind of sulkiness made famous (to certain parts of the country at least) by an Arctic Monkeys song. He moans, fumes and grumbles during an awkward drive from Nottingham to Manchester after being told the budget won’t cover three nights in the hotel. He is a Saxondale for the next generation (roadying for 90s indie-rockers Guided by Voices rather than Deep Purple) but equally out of time in 2009 (and out of place when not on the road). His old-fashioned idea of cool (fake American accent) seems at odds with Arctic Monkeys’ strong provincial identity (although they are starting to look and sound more like Led Zep as I write). But Considine somehow makes him a sympathetic character. Shane Meadows, as one of the two cameramen, can be seen and heard from behind the camera (failing to be a fly on the wall), offering much appreciated relationship advice when he isn’t laughing at or arguing with him.

Considine is of course a brilliant actor (he was easily the best thing about this year’s otherwise rather disappointing Red Riding Trilogy) and the film rises above the slightness of the plot thanks to the depth of his performance alone. But real-life rapper Scor-Zay-Zee proves himself worthy of his equal billing. Gormlessly wandering around, looking for somewhere to plug in his keyboard, or pulling ridiculous rapper poses for a photographer, he somehow pulls it off at the performance in front of the real (unknowing) Arctic Monkeys audience and shows himself to be a genuinely original and talented artist.

Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee was made as the first of a series of five-day features to be financed by Warp Films. Whatever the result of this initiative, Meadows’s film shows what is possible. Its simplicity, cheapness and speed of execution are its virtues, but it also succeeds as a touching portrait of ambitions and dreams and their relationship to reality.

Paul Huckerby

Cinema releases

KATALIN VARGA

Katalin Varga

Format: Cinema

Release date: 9 October 2009

Venues: Barbican, Chelsea Cinema, Curzons Richmond and Soho (London) and key cities

Distributor: Artifical Eye

Director: Peter Strickland

Writer: Peter Strickland

Cast: Hilda Péter, Tibor Pí¡lffy, Norbert Tankí³, Fatma Mohamed

Romania/UK/Hungary 2009

82 mins

Just as the hype about the ‘New Wave’ in post-communist Romanian cinema seems to have settled down, October sees the theatrical release of two new films set in that country, although they have nothing else in common. Directed by a group of young Romanian directors and devised by Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), Tales from the Golden Age explores five urban legends from the nation’s troubled past. In contrast, Katalin Varga, directed by British writer-director Peter Strickland, offers a dark fable unfolding in the rural wilds of the Romanian hinterland with an unexcited, outdated look, and little interest in the cutting social criticism that has become the trademark of Eastern European filmmaking in the last few years. The film chronicles the journey of a young peasant’s wife who has to face her demons in the Transylvanian forest and is led to seek vengeance on the two men who violated her a decade earlier. Although the rape-revenge story may not sound original on paper, Katalin Varga is a daring, stylistically confident British feature debut that in its thirst for cinematic exploration and adventure recalls Asif Kapadia’s stunning The Warrior (2001), with which it also shares a spellbinding location and a bold belief in the compelling power of visual storytelling.

But why would a young filmmaker with no money and no knowledge of the foreign language want to make a film in Transylvania? ‘This was simply the place I chose to shoot in because it seemed to offer the right atmosphere for my story,’ says Strickland. ‘In a way, I thought I could be truer to myself with a film that is set in the mountains rather than in Reading, where I come from’. Yet, slim and elliptical as the narrative is, it feels at times as if the story is there to help explore the setting, rather than the other way round. This is especially true in the first part, when Katalin (impressively played by Hilda Péter), banished by her husband (and the entire village) after the discovery that he is not actually the father of their 11-year-old son Orbí¡n, sets out on a mission to hunt down her tormentors. Mother and son ride a horse-cart up into the Carpathians, sleeping in people’s barns, until they reach their destination. As Katalin finds and confronts Antal, the man who assaulted her, Strickland offers no simple tale of retribution, but explores a painfully complex emotional situation in a riveting manner.

Given the film’s precise aesthetic and increasingly chilling, expressionistic feel, it comes as little surprise to learn that Peter Strickland’s key points of reference for Katalin Varga were Werner Herzog and the great Russian film poets Tarkovsky and Paradjanov. A good part of the film alternates between sun-drenched expanses of the Carpathian fields and mountains, looming forests and murky nocturnal rural interiors. All are equally unsettling once Strickland abandons conventional art-house meandering camera pans and cryptic myth-making to opt instead for an increasingly rough photography with abrupt scene changes and searching close-ups. Infusing his elegantly wrought images with a throbbing, electronic-choral score that is very much at odds with the naturalistic setting, Strickland is clearly more concerned with the human dimension of the morally intricate scenario, revealing the astonishingly beautiful landscape as a place where a brutal sort of justice will eventually prevail.

Showing an obvious talent for creating a misty atmosphere of dread, Strickland keeps the time setting eerily vague. The horse-cart suggests a bygone era until Katalin picks up her mobile phone for the first time to talk to her husband, and it is to Strickland’s credit that he makes use of a number of different tactics to subvert our expectations. ‘It makes people angry when they see Antal,’ he says, ‘because they expect him to be this evil monster. And Katalin does too. But evil people are not evil every single working hour, and by not showing the crime he committed against her I’m furthering our confusion, so the audience is almost like a jury in this sense’.

Some may feel that Strickland veers a little too much into metaphysical territory at the expense of keeping the tension up. Others may dislike his partiality to painterly compositions and Tarkovskian cinematic poetry. Despite such arguable flaws, Katalin Varga often hits a note of genuine otherworldliness, and the power of this slow-burning, nightmarish tale is utterly compelling, contrasting with Strickland’s modest expectations when he was making the film: ‘I really thought we would fail,’ he admits. ‘But I also thought, if I screw up I might as well fail in style. On a very personal level, this film was an adventure, and we reconciled ourselves to the fact that we had the memories of making it - because filmmaking is so difficult when you are outside the system that you have to at least try to have a good time with it.’

Pamela Jahn

Home entertainment

HEROSTRATUS

Herostratus

Format: DVD

Date: 24 August 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Don Levy

Writer: Don Levy

Cast: Michael Gothard, Mona Chin, Helen Mirren

UK 1967

137 mins

Herostratus in a nut shell: callow young poet and narcissist played by Michael Gothard decides to indulge in the ultimate act of narcissism - suicide - and flog the whole thing to the ghastly advertising industry. All of this is wrapped up in dyspeptically groovy, ideologically limp, Situationist-lite-lite, pop-modernism.

The idea that marketing/advertising has no moral bounds; that it is a crass, vulgar, cynical, pervasive, opportunist industry should come as no surprise to 21st-century mortals living under global capitalism. Indeed, it should strike most people as being utterly obvious that it is so. Why, only some months ago I recall television images of Jade Goody being shovelled into the grave amongst wreathes with the Marmite logo emblazoned upon them. So the observations made by writer-director Don Levy in this film about capitalism, advertising, commodity fetishism, spectacle, youth and mortality seem merely quaint and rather superficial.

This is not simply because it is an anachronism, there is a whole slew of critical culture contemporaneous to Herostratus that remains potent. For example, Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle) was released in 1967, as was Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, but Levy’s film is not to be filed alongside such beasts because it just does not share their wit, ideological depth or analytical chutzpah.

As audio-visual spectacle, Herostratus is rather spectacular (for a bit) and has all the expected provocative thrills of modernism: jump cuts, deft use of noise and silence, fragmented narrative, non-sequitur. However, the content does not merit the duration. At two hours and 17 minutes, this film has it longueurs… longueurs that last approximately two hours. One feels that a postcard-sized idea has been stretched across a Guernica-sized canvas. Herostratus also seems to ape the very thing it denigrates in its cheap juxtaposition of cinematic tropes and objects - for example a laughably trite sex-and-meat scene (a striptease melds with forensic shots of butchery). The film seems to convey the confusion of its protagonist and the protagonist’s perception of the world as dissonant plastic space by contrasting excellent, surgically precise camera choreography and montage with cooler, looser, improvised scenes. But I suspect this is also testament to Levy’s intellectual confusion.

Herostratus has been released by the BFI as part of its series of kitsch nostalgic DVD releases entitled Flipside. Undoubtedly, it is a great transfer in terms of the technical reproduction, but if it had zombies, pornography, violence and a cameo appearance from Arthur Lowe, and was a give-away with the Sunday Telegraph, I might shell out for a centre-right newspaper and my grimace might mutate into a grin. Right now, my mouth is fixed in a rictus of callow disgruntlement. Marmite for me.

Philip Winter

Home entertainment

La t&#234te contre les murs

La Tete contre les murs

Format: DVD

Date: 21 September 2009

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Georges Franju

Writers: Jean-Pierre Mocky, Jean-Charles Pichon

Based on the novel by: Hervé Bazin

Cast: Jean-Pierre Mocky, Anouk Aimée, Pierre Brasseur

France 1959

93 mins

La tête contre les murs (The Keepers) started as the pet project of Jean-Pierre Mocky, who wrote the script (from Hervé Bazin’s novel) and cast the actors, including himself in the lead role as a bequiffed, leather-clad, motorcycling rebel who finds himself ‘imprisoned’ in a mental institution by his lawyer father. Although Mocky went on to become a prolific director himself, the respected documentarist and co-founder of the Cinématèque Française Georges Franju was hired to make the film, which was his feature debut.

François Gérane (Mocky) is a young rock’n’roller pitched against straight society, who refuses to find a steady job and drops out of art college because he is not interested in ‘methodical learning’ – a French James Dean for the Johnny Hallyday generation perhaps. To get rid of him, his authoritarian father has him committed to a mental hospital. That institution is far from a ‘Bedlam’, more a slow-paced country retreat, but what one patient calls a ‘cushy number’ is for the kicks-loving motocross rider François ‘a living death’. With François locked up, the film takes on a more languid pace, and in this way is very different from Hollywood films with a similar subject matter. It is without the melodrama of Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit (1948) or the sensationalism of Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963). We are denied the gratuitous scenes of the other patients taking turns to show their idiosyncratic ailments that litter such Hollywood fare. The patients or inmates are largely subdued and rarely aggressive, lost in their own worlds unless encouraged to work together holding hands and walking in a circle – a child-like ‘Ring o’ Rosies’ game. But François is falling in love with his visitor Stéphanie (Anouk Aimée) and needs to get out…

As Michel Foucault wrote in Madness and Civilisation (1961), such houses of confinement were developed in the 17th century for those by whom society feels threatened (madness replacing leprosy in the popular imagination, he argues), an attitude still strongly felt in 1959, it seems. Although Dr Valmont (Pierre Brasseur) declares the hospital to have two functions – ‘to cure the insane and protect society’ – the debate is as to which is the more important. These two points of view are represented by Dr Valmont and Dr Emery. François and his friend Heurtevent (Charles Aznavour, brilliant in his award-winning screen debut) have the misfortune of being patients of the former.

The film is shot entirely on location but often seems slightly unreal. Franju typically – and certainly when teamed with cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan (Quai des brumes, Lilith) – makes a film full of poetic and atmospheric images. Shots of motorbikes driving down poplar-lined lanes may not propel the narrative forward but certainly look stunning. Fellow patients carry doves for no apparent reason and ride on a mini-railway carrying them to and from their work details. The music by composer Maurice Jarre (the father of Jean-Michel at the beginning of his long film career) adds to this almost-strange atmosphere perfectly. Franju’s lyrical style adds to the film without ever dominating it or making it too whimsical. With the Gothic horror story of his next film, Franju (again with Schüfftan and Jarre) was freed to go much further stylistically to create his masterpiece and perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful film ever made – Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face.

Paul Huckerby

See also Judex by the same director.

Cinema releases, Festivals

RAINDANCE 09: KAKERA

Kakera

17th Raindance Film Festival

Date: 30 September-11 October 2009

Venue: Apollo Cinema, London

Title: Kakera – A Piece of Our Lives

Part of a Raindance strand on Japanese Women Directors

Director: Momoko Ando

Based on the manga by: Erica Sakurazawa

Cast: Hikari Mitsushima, Eriko Nakamura

Japan 2008

Raindance website

Kakera - A Piece of Our Lives does what its title suggests. Kakera presents a slice of life. No grand narrative; no neatly conceived conclusions; just a segment of a relationship between two women, Haru and Riko, as they define their feelings for each other. Shooting with a microscopic attention to detail, first-time director Momoko Ando creates a thoroughly compelling world - beautiful, surreal, romantic and personal - aided by an excellent soundtrack and strong visual sense.

Rumpled and gamine, Haru is an especially engrossing heroine. All expressive eyes and otherworldly charm, she belongs to the Amélie school of little-girl-lost. Just starting out at university, Haru is growing more and more detached from her two-timing, loutish boyfriend, when she meets Riko, a self-assured medical artist working for Tanaka prosthetics. The film follows Haru’s sexual confusion as she tries to decide between Riko and her increasingly obnoxious boyfriend. As a young director (she was born in 1982), Ando perfectly captures the intensity of the women’s age and the excitement of their first, stumbling conversations. But while Amélie praised naive, kooky heroines in a nauseatingly self-congratulatory fashion, Kakera presents the reality of living with Haru’s dreamy drifting. The film explores both the allure of the inexperienced girls and their sometimes hurtful, self-centred behaviour.

The self-absorption of youth is beautifully played out in a subtle scene when a disinterested, distracted Haru leaves a university lecture discussing the oppression of women, only to be confronted with her boyfriend arm-in-arm with another girl. Gender and what it means to be a woman is an important theme underlying the entire film and one of the reasons the work is to premiere at this year’s Raindance Festival, as part of a special strand devoted to women in Japanese cinema. Again, Ando chooses not to present us with a coherent theory but prefers fragmented, conflicting ideas and discussions. Riko, for example, gives a beautiful initial speech on the arbitrariness of gender but later becomes irrationally hostile towards men. Beautiful fireworks enjoyed by Riko and Haru are echoed by aggressive, masculine explosions on television in Haru’s boyfriend’s flat. When the two women first meet, Haru has accidentally given herself a milk moustache while drinking a mug of cocoa while later in the film Haru’s boyfriend is unkind about the hair on her upper lip.

Kakera is all about the pieces that make up the whole: from the prosthetic body parts made by Riko to the chromosomes that determine the difference between men and women. When a distraught Haru eats too many marshmallows, she is advised ‘not to over-eat the food you love. Favourite foods are better eaten a little at a time’. Kakera takes each character little by little, each life slice by slice, allowing us the luxury to come to our own conclusions.

Eleanor McKeown

Kakera is part of a strand on Japanese women directors at Raindance. Director Momoko Ando will attend the festival, as well as pink director Sachi Hamano, the most prolific female director in Japan, who will present her 2001 non-pink title Lily Festival. Also showing are the rarely seen Hotaru by the critically-garlanded Naomi Kawase and Yukiko Sode’s distinctive and promising debut Mime-Mime. More information on the Raindance website.

Cinema releases

WHITE LIGHTNIN’

White Lightnin'

Format: Cinema

Date: 25 September 2009

Venues: ICA and Rich Mix, London

Director: Dominic Murphy

Writer: Eddy Moretti, Shane Smith

Cast: Edward Hogg, Carrie Fisher, Muse Watson

UK 2009

92 mins

A dark, surreal semi-biopic about the ‘Dancin’ Outlaw’ Jesco White (impressively played by newcomer Ed Hogg), Dominic Murphy’s feature debut White Lightnin’ follows Jesco from his early childhood in West Virginia, mostly spent sniffing gasoline and lighter fluid, to an increasingly criminal and violent adolescence. Although his god-fearing father, the legendary Appalachian mountain dancer D Ray White, teaches him to dance in order to keep him on the straight and narrow, the temptations that torment Jesco prove too strong and frequently get him into trouble with the law, and he ends up in a mental institution. While he is locked up, Jesco learns the shocking news of D Ray’s death. After his release, he decides to do his best to live up to his father’s principles and starts touring around the South, performing in bars with his father’s old guitarist. But his uncontrollable temper puts an end to this and Jesco settles down in a trailer with his much older girlfriend (surprisingly and superbly played by Carrie Fisher). His inner demons increasingly take over and the voices in his head scream for revenge for the murder of D Ray, who was killed in a senseless act of redneck violence. From there, the film takes us deeper and deeper into Jesco’s crazed visions and wild religious fantasies, culminating in a horrifically inventive Old Testament-style revenge followed by an equally violent act of Christ-like self-sacrifice.

Merging real-life events and unbridled fiction, writers (and co-producers) Shane Smith and Eddy Moretti have crafted a bold, nightmarish tale of Southern darkness and Murphy takes the subject matter to cinematic extremes, using a hand-held camera, bizarre angles and repeated blackouts to convey Jesco’s disturbed state of mind. Jesco’s narration guides us through the remembered fragments of his life, occasionally intercut with a thundering preacher’s voice delivering apocalyptic sermons against backgrounds of darkened skies and ominous mountains. Rare touches of colour bleeding through the moody, grainy, muted cinematography combine with the score’s distorted sounds, sparse guitars and shrill strings to convey the story’s underlying sense of doom and despair. Intensely imagined and vividly directed, White Lightnin’ is a raw, rabid, howling hillbilly hell trip that doesn’t let up.

Pamela Jahn

The Electric Sheep Film Club presents a preview of White Lightnin’ on Wednesday 2 September at the Prince Charles, London, followed by a Q&A with Dominic Murphy. More details on our events page.

Read Pamela Jahn’s interview with Dominic Murphy in the autumn 09 issue of Electric Sheep. The focus is on religious extremes on film from Christic masochism to satanic cruelty to coincide with the release of biblical hillbilly nightmare White Lightnin’, with articles on Jesus Christ Saviour, a documentary on Klaus Kinski’s disastrous New Testament stage play, and divine subversives Alejandro Jodorowsky and Kenneth Anger among others. Plus: Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, political animation, Raindance 09 and louche mariachi rockabilly Dan Sartain picks his top films!

Cinema releases

PONTYPOOL

Pontypool

Format: Cinema

Date: 16 October 2009

Venues: key cities

Distributor: Kaleidoscope Entertainment

Preview: 25 September, FACT, Liverpool, as part of the Abandon Normal Devices Festival

Director: Bruce McDonald

Writer: Tony Burgess

Cast: Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly, Hrant Alianak

Canada 2008

95 mins

Returning after the ambitiously flawed drama The Tracey Fragments (2007), Canadian director Bruce McDonald offers a bizarrely original adaptation of Tony Burgess’s novel Pontypool Changes Everything. Taking place within a single location, a radio studio in small-town Ontario, the film centres around frustrated shock jockey Grant Mazzy, whose innovative views and delivery are wasted on routine news items such as school bus cancellations and missing cats. Joining him in the studio are producer Sydney, with whom he shares a tempestuous professional relationship, and his bright assistant Laurel. On a typically mundane morning, their ‘eye in the sky’ helicopter correspondent calls in with reports of disturbing behaviour downtown and unexplainable acts of violence. Switching between pre-recorded shows and live broadcast, the three attempt to investigate the situation using what facilities they have, soon discovering their own broadcasts may be contributing to the mayhem.

Despite the limitations of the single location, Pontypool uses the confinement to the radio studio to great advantage, giving the film an insular and paranoid quality that only unravels in the film’s last quarter, as the infected residents inevitably break through the studio doors. The impossibly peculiar situation is well channeled through the three characters, occupying a position of power through the radio airwaves, and the relationships between them are interestingly played, particularly the contrasting ideologies and sexual tension between host and producer. Stephen McHattie gives a brilliant performance as Mazzy; with his gruff vocal delivery and withered yet enigmatic appearance he inhabits the role of an ageing radio host perfectly.

While the virus reveals itself to be unnecessarily complex and quite confusing, the concept of danger being spread through language is an interesting exploration point for a horror film. To elaborate would give too much away, though a hilariously notable set-piece shows two characters desperately speaking in pigeon French to avoid catching the virus. Scenes such as this confirm Pontypool as an imaginative addition to the zombie/virus horror canon.

James Merchant

Pontypool will preview at the AND Festival in Liverpool on September 25. It opens in the UK on October 16.

Double Take Reviews, Home entertainment

Double Take: Jane Arden’s Separation

Separation

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 13 July 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Jack Bond

Writer: Jane Arden

Cast: Jane Arden, David de Keyser, Ann Lynn, Iain Quarrier

UK 1967

93 mins

Also released by the BFI: The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) and Anti-Clock (1979)

Although she has been inexplicably forgotten in recent cultural history, Jane Arden was a prolific and challenging writer, filmmaker, playwright and actress. To mark the release after 26 years of obscurity of restored versions of three of her films, Separation (1967), The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) and Anti-Clock (1979), LISA WILLIAMS discusses the former with SELINA ROBERTSON and SARAH WOOD, film curators of Club Des Femmes. Written by Arden and directed by her partner Jack Bond, Separation is a visually inventive, fragmented but playful evocation of a woman’s inner world as she faces the breakdown of her marriage.

Sarah Robertson: When I searched for Jane Arden’s name online initially I found her to be a US comic book heroine from the 1940s… So there are two Jane Ardens floating around.

Lisa Williams: Arden was born Norah Patricia Morris. I wonder whether she had the early comic book heroine in mind when she renamed herself. Both figures are women braving a man’s world, whether that be investigative journalism or filmmaking.

Sarah Wood: It made me think of Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden where all gender roles can transform: girls can be boys. I had mixed feelings about the film. In some ways, I found Bond’s direction too stylised, too self-conscious. I felt that it hadn’t found its own form, that it was 8 1/2 crossed with Performance crossed with Persona crossed with Alphaville. At the same time, I liked the fact that it was a fractured jigsaw of styles, that no one approach could express the new thing that the film was trying to convey. What is radical for me about the film is the content. To hear the early voice of feminism expressed before there was any form of collective identification is amazing and vulnerable. I was most struck by the dialogues between Arden’s character and her ex-husband. It was very powerful to watch his pathologising control countered by her tentative voicing of the need to be seen as an equal.

SR: I have to say that I had never seen anything like it before, certainly in British avant-garde cinema. It was thrilling, painful, coquettish, beautiful and so joyfully experimental that all I could do was watch. I just couldn’t believe that I had never heard of her name before. The way she placed herself in the story, her body, her image, her emotions, for me very much challenged the typical construct of female subjectivity - woman as spectacle…

LW: I loved how ‘Jane’ the character and Jane the filmmaker were represented by ‘Jane’, ‘Granny’ and ‘Woman’. To me, it was like a forerunner of some of Cindy Sherman’s photography.

SR: Absolutely - feminist personas. I loved the fact that the film notes say that her clothes were from Carrot on Wheels, Quorum, Deliss and Granny Takes a Trip!

SW: Yes! She is a wonderful fashionable construct. It is such a joke within a joke!

LW: It is said that Arden ‘directed the film from within’. She wrote the script and praised Bond’s way of reinterpreting it on the screen. But it certainly complicates matters that such a feminist and personal work is directed by a man.

SR: At the BFI screening of Separation her absence created a big hole: Bond did not really want to talk about his working relationship with Arden – I’m not sure why – and there was only one question from the floor about her plays. I guess this is understandable because he was there representing the film - but frustrating as well. But I think her absence is not atypical. When was it that Linda Nochlin wrote that famous text ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ I think it was in 1971…

[…]

Read the rest of the dialogue in the autumn 09 issue of Electric Sheep. The focus is on religious extremes on film from Christic masochism to satanic cruelty with articles on biblical hillbilly nightmare White Lightnin’, Jesus Christ Saviour, a documentary on Klaus Kinski’s disastrous New Testament stage play, and divine subversives Alejandro Jodorowsky and Kenneth Anger. Plus: Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, political animation, Raindance 09 and louche mariachi rockabilly Dan Sartain picks his top films!

Home entertainment

Footprints

Footprints

Format: DVD

Release date: 31 August 2009

Distributor: Shameless Entertainment

Director: Luigi Bazzoni, Mario Fanelli (uncredited)

Writers: Luigi Bazzoni, Mario Fanelli

Original title: Le orme

Cast: Florinda Bolkan, Klaus Kinski, Peter McEnery, Nicoletta Elmi, Lila Kedovra

Italy 1975

92 mins

Like Alice, the young translator whose strange journey we follow in Footprints (Le orme), you may find yourself hit by waves of tingling déj&#224 vu, recurrent nightmare and flickering, almost remembered memory when watching this long-lost Italian thriller. Have I seen that peacock stained-glass window before? I’m sure I’ve stood on that mysterious hill overlooking that same sea?

If it wasn’t for the fact that this psychedelically haunting giallo from 1975 has never before been released in the UK, and has been unavailable worldwide on DVD until now, it would be easy to cite its influence on later moonlit dips into the interior, like some of the more cerebral moments of Argento, Aronofsky’s The Fountain, US experimental filmmaker Nina Menke’s work and of course many of Lynch’s delights.

Through an impressive performance by Florinda Bolkan (who also starred in ‘nunsploitation’ flick Flavia the Heretic), we are drawn into Alice’s world and her degenerating psychological state. A yellow dress has appeared overnight in her wardrobe, lurid against her row of beige suits. There’s also a ripped up postcard with an image of an opulent hotel on her kitchen floor. Alice’s colleagues have just informed her she’s been missing from work for three days, and the dream of an astronaut abandoned on the moon continues playing out in her mind’s eye. Alice’s seemingly straightforward existence has been torn apart and she must travel to the exotic island of Garma to piece things back together. We are drawn all the more powerfully into her world as she seems credible and intelligent, not prone to hysterical flights of fancy like the flailing token females that plague many gialli. And to this is added the impressive, disturbing cameo by Klaus Kinski as the sinister scientist Dr Blackmann.

Director Luigi Bazzoni’s treatment of Footprints is visionary, being equal parts style and substance, enhanced much by the cinematography of Vittorio Storraro, who of course also contributed his extraordinary talent to the films of Bertolucci and Coppola. It’s certainly a visual treat and while it is true to its era, it retains an elegance even in the final surrealist sequence on the stunning Balkan beach. The dream/memory flashbacks are executed with restraint and subtlety, and as a result have a particularly memorable impact on the subconscious mind. Perhaps a little like Storraro himself, this is a film with a sassy sense of its own style: it’s not just dressed to impress.

Footprints comes with the added appeal of obscurity: you’ll probably be the only one you know who’s seen it. The price to pay for this obscurity is the crude restoration of previously lost scenes, and the sudden (unintentionally) hilarious switches from English to Italian. These can be forgiven but do detract slightly from the overall credibility of the film. All in all, however, for those longing for an existentialist, sci-fi adventure that combines the narrative mystery and sense of isolation of Solaris with the vivid Italian visions of Argento: this is the film you’ve been dreaming of.

Siouxzi Mernagh

Home entertainment

GOTH: LOVE OF DEATH

3 Comments
Goth: Love of Death

Format: DVD

Release date: 21 September 2009

Distributor: 4Digital Asia

Director: Takahashi Gen

Writers: Gram, Hotta Takashi, Kashiwada Nichio, Saitô Midori, Takahashi Gen

Based on the novel by: Otsuichi

Cast: Takanashi Rin, Hongô Kanata

Japan 2008

95 mins

Serial killers, severed limbs, angsty teens, another Japanese splatter-fest right? Wrong, Goth is the complete opposite, an anti-serial killer film. It does without the shock and gore, the screaming and squelchy sound effects, and takes a distant, detached view on murderers and their victims. It’s not about making the audience jump out of their seats but taking them on a journey of morbid fascination into the cold, almost serene, stillness of death.

The film follows two teenagers in a grey Tokyo suburb; Morino (Takanashi Rin) is a pale, though pretty, loner that no one takes an interest in and Kamiyama (Hongô Kanata) is one of the most popular guys in school. They’re opposites but have one thing in common - an unhealthy interest in the work of a local serial killer who murders beautiful women, removes their left hand and leaves them elegantly posed to be found by a horrified member of the public.

Though the content suggests otherwise, director Takahashi Gen never seeks to shock or linger on the gruesomeness of killing. Instead, he mostly sticks with the point of view of the teenagers who start to visit the crime scenes, and through them we see the artistry involved: the victims are treated as sculptures, or art installations, in a twisted attempt to preserve their beauty. The pair later stumble across the killer’s notebook, which allows them to visit as yet undiscovered bodies and gain further insight into his reasoning.

Takahashi moves things along very slowly, his camera often drifting with the characters in a daze reminiscent of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. It perfectly captures the mood of the disillusioned teens who rarely feel connected to the world around them. The ‘goth’ of the title isn’t about their outward appearance (they don’t wear long black coats or freaky make-up) but their inner feelings towards death and how their fascination blocks out everything else. While an impatient adult might want to say ‘oh, just grow up’, Takahashi understands that the young, developing mind must come to terms with its own mortality.

Morino and Kamiyama remain passive for most of the film. After finding the notebook they decide not to turn it over to the police, even though it could save someone’s life. They remain withdrawn, desperate to know where the killer will strike next like the admirers of a celebrity. Theirs is a life of watching, whether it’s the news or their teacher at school, so when something exciting and dangerous comes along they want to be a part of it. Morino even goes as far as dressing like one of the victims, a dig at Hollywood movies where the dowdy goth girl suddenly becomes the gorgeous babe.

There’s an attempt to unmask the killer but not in the way you might think, resulting in an unpredictable ‘showdown’ that oozes tension. Takahashi’s only misstep is to add a bonus twist surrounding Morino’s sister and this seems needless, an extra layer of confusion to try and explain why she is the way she is. The director need not worry, his handling of suicidal teen frustration is rightly melancholic and easily believable in a world where death surrounds us in all forms of media.

Rich Badley